The Four Problems AI Solves

Strip away the jargon and nearly every AI application reduces to one of four moves:

• Search & optimization — find the best option among astronomical possibilities: Google Maps picking your route, a chess engine choosing a move, an airline scheduling crews
• Prediction — estimate a number or outcome: delivery ETAs, tomorrow's electricity demand, which customers will churn
• Classification — assign a label: spam or not-spam, tumor or benign, fraud or legit
• Generation — produce something new: a paragraph, an image, a melody

Same engine underneath — patterns learned from data. What differs is the question asked.